Hunger broke his trance of walking. He stopped to eat; when he went on he felt less dreamy, more alert. The trail now got so steep in places that he leaned forward on both hands to rest, and he felt the mountain press against his hands, the bulk and depth and strength of the earth, her grainy skin rough with rocks and roots. For a long time the trail had been going somewhat left of the gateway axis. Now it turned back towards the axis and leveled out. He could stand straight and walk freely, and the easier rhythm was a relief. The firs crowded thick, high, and dark, the air under them was dark, but as he looked ahead he saw the clear breadth of the trail, almost a road here. And in the dry air he caught, once, once again, the faint scent of woodsmoke.
Now he walked steadily, alert, intent.
The road swung in a long rising curve, on and on. The slopes to the right below it steepened and began to drop away so sharply that the trees below the road no longer blocked the view. He could for the first time in this land see for a long way. He saw that he was on the side of a mountain. To his right and ahead, beyond a falling sweep of treetops, the rim of a farther mountain stood dark against the clarity of sky. He walked on more slowly, a little dazed, feeling himself as if floating between the vast, obscure valleys and the vast gulfs of the sky. He looked along the road as it turned again, and saw nestled against the mountain shoulder the roofs and chimneys of a town, the gleam of a lighted window in the cold dusk. There was home, and he walked towards it, and came down the street between the lamp-lit windows, hearing a child’s voice calling words he did not understand.
4
In daylight he did not look so big, and he was younger than she had thought, her own age or younger, a heavy, stoop-shouldered, white-faced boy. He was stupid, not understanding anything she said. “I need to come back,” he said, as if asking her permission, as if she could or would permit him. “I’m trying to warn you,” she said, but he did not understand, and she could bear it no longer. She had walked from Mountain Town to the gateway and was tired from that and from the anger and terror of this confrontation with him, and she had to go on and get home, clean up, eat, get to work—Patsi would be asking where she’d spent the night—it was broad daylight, Wednesday, she had promised to take her mother’s stuff to the dry cleaner’s. He stood there, the charcoal of her sign smeared on his face, the contemptible enemy, and she had to leave him there and go, not knowing if she would find the way open to her when she came back.
It was earlier than she had thought. She got to the apartment a little after six. Rick and Patsi had not been talking to each other for a couple of days, and she got included in their vindictive silence, so no questions were asked about where she had spent the night. When she got back from work that evening, Patsi continued to interpret her night’s absence as a sign of disloyalty, and loftily ignored it; Rick alluded to it only for his own purposes—“Shit, what does anybody want to sleep here for?”
She had been glad to move in with Rick and Patsi last fall. They were generous without overdoing the sharing bit, and liked the place clean enough to live in but not clean enough to drive you up the wall. Her paying a third of the rent was important to them since Rick wasn’t working. It had been a good arrangement, and still would be, except that Rick and Patsi were breaking up, and so no arrangement that involved them as a couple could be good. The worst of it now was that Rick wanted to use her against Patsi, and her staying out a night and offering no explanation gave him the idea that she might be available for more than a phony pass. All she had to say was that she’d spent the night at her mother’s place, but she didn’t want to stoop to lying to him; he no longer deserved the honor of a lie. He kept trying to come into her room and talk. On Thursday night he kept at it, it was serious, he said, they had to discuss the future, Patsi wasn’t willing to talk seriously but somebody had to. Not me, Irene thought. Rick, a thin fellow of twenty-five covered with reddish, curly hair like a well-worn Teddy bear, stood with lounging persistence between her and the door to her room. He wore only a pair of jeans with the worn-through knees gaping open weirdly. His toes were very long and thin. “I don’t feel like talking about anything specially,” Irene said, but he went on, talking through his nose about how somebody around here had to talk sometime and he wanted to explain some things about him and Patsi that Irene ought to know.
“Not tonight,” Irene said, slamming a kitchen drawer, and bolted past him into her room and shut the door. He lounged around the kitchen for a while swearing and then slammed his way out of the apartment. Patsi, in the other bedroom, slammed nothing, maintaining a righteous silence.
Irene sat on the edge of her bed with her shoulders hunched forward and her hands between her knees and thought, This can’t last. End of the month, we’ve had it. Then where?
She had been lucky, being able to stay out here near her mother and paying only one-third rent. She had been able to pay off the car, which her job for Mott and Zerming depended on, and pay for a brake job and two new tires. She could afford to pay more for rent, but not as much as an efficiency out here would cost. The thing to do would be move into the city, downtown, and pay about half as much, but then her mother would worry about her getting raped and hassled; and it would take half an hour or forty minutes to get out here, so she would worry about her mother. If only she would call when Victor got drunk. But she wouldn’t call.
Irene got up and went out, slamming the front door a little, and walked over to see her mother.
It was a hot, still night. A lot of people were out. Chelsea Gardens Avenue was a roar of cars gunning, idling, drag racing, cruising. At the farm, Victor had rigged up a floodlight so he could work on his car in the front yard. There was no reason why he should do it at night, he had the whole day and was no good at fixing cars anyhow, Irene had taken auto shop and knew twice as much as he did about engines; but he liked to be in the spotlight. He had a wrench in one hand and a beer can in the other and was yelling at the boys, “Get the fuck away from those tools, you little bastards!” Two or three of his sons, Irene’s half brothers, rushed past her through the glare and darkness of the yard. They paid no attention to her arrival, but the dogs did, the three little dogs yapping hysterically at her ankles and the crazy Doberman that Victor kept chained up choking off his terrible bark by lunging on his chain. Irene’s mother was in the cavernous kitchen with Treese, the four-year-old. Treese was at the table eating chocolate-flavored cereal from the package while her mother moved slowly about collecting the dinner dishes to wash. It was nine o’clock. “Hello, Irena my darling,” Mrs. Hanson said with a slow, happy smile, and they hugged each other.
Mary Hanson was thirty-nine years old and had had three miscarriages and six pregnancies carried to term. Michael and Irene were the children of her first husband, Nick Pannis, dead of leukemia three months after Michael’s birth. Nick’s aunt had taken in the young widow and her babies. The aunt owned the farmhouse and a share in the tree nursery across the road, where she worked. When she retired and took her savings to a mobile home in Florida, she gave the farmhouse and its half acre to Mary. Shortly after that Victor Hanson moved in, married Mary, and begot Wayne, then Dalton, then David, then Treese and the miscarriages. Victor had theories about many things, including sex, and liked to expound them to people: “See, if the man doesn’t get rid of the fertile material, you understand what I mean, the fertile cells, they back up and cause the prostrate gland. That material has to be cleared out regularly or they make poison, same as anything doesn’t get cleared out regularly. Same as clean bowels, or blowing your nose, if you don’t blow your nose you can get impacted sinus trouble.” Victor was a big, well-made, handsome man, much concerned with his body and its functions and appearance, a central reality of which the rest of the world and other people were mere reflections without substance: the self-concern of the athlete or the invalid, though he was neither, being healthy and inactive. He had worked for an aluminum-siding company, but the job disappeared after a while. Sometimes he worked for a friend who sold used cars. Sometimes he went off with friends named Don and Fred, or Dwight and Roy, who were in the TV repair business or the auto-parts business; he would come back with some money, always in cash. From time to time a lot of bicycles were stored in the old tractor shed, which he kept padlocked. The little boys were crazy to get at the bikes, good ten-speeds, new-looking, but he knocked Dalton across the room once for even mentioning the bicycles, which he was storing as a favor for his friend Dwight.